Diogenes says:
I don't care about the "official" chronology, or playing too close to the books. Indeed, I think that it would be undesirable to try and hew too close to the what's been written already.
Well, when I ask people about whereabouts in the series they might like to adventure, it's more to give me some guidance as to who's in the city, what the place looks like, who's dead/alive (or both), etc. I don't try to follow any particular story with this information.
Diogenes says:
I just want to play a well-run, pulpy, action-packed urban adventure in the low-fantasy setting of the Thieve's World universe. No "main characters" or planned-out storylines, just thieves and outlaws scrambling to make some gold and stay ahead of the law. Give us a couple of options for jobs, like maybe a heist in a noble's mansion, breaking someone out of prison, going into the undercity and killing monsters to collect bounty money, sneaking into a ruined temple and recovering the lost treasure, anything like that is cool. I wouldn't be interested in a campaign that's focused on intrigue or is like a "soap opera" as you say. I want to play through something that's more like a Conan or Fahfrd and the Grey Mouser story, like you could literally run something like Tower of the Elephant and I'd love it.
Hmm. Here's where things might get tricky . . . .
First, I wouldn't at all consider Thieves' World "pulpy". It isn't "swashbuckling sword and sorcery", like Waterdeep or Lankhmar. I can't imagine, say, Fafhrd or Khelben Arunsun, getting tempted out from behind their defences then getting trapped and almost killed by a gang of homeless street-children, attacking en masse with a few knives and lots of pointed sticks and rocks, something that happened to one of the best fighters in the city who was also the top crime-lord there (he had to be rescued by, of all people, a cop, and it was done by the fuzz attacking the kids while they were concentrating on their victim and butchering between them enough children to force the others to run for their lives). It's that kind of a setting.
The kinds of monsters and treasure you might find in a Conan story are basically absent from this place, so much so or presented in such a way as to make me think the authors deliberately played on those tropes by twisting them completely around from the genre's expectation. Piles of gold and jewels turn out to be illusions that vanish with a touch; non-human creatures are very often far less "monstrous" than many of the town's inhabitants.
Stories _very_ roughly along the lines as you described above are possible (that's why I mentioned "things less mundane" than soap-opera type stuff), but they're heavily leavened with human frailty.
Nobody else has so-far said anything about preferring one way or another for tone or mood, so I'd be happy to put you and others through something approximating what you described, but I'm not sure you'd be satisfied. I'm running the game for my own amusement, too, and I'm not in the mood right now for The Hyborian Age or Nehwon. Maybe later . . . .
So would you still like to give it a try?
